A utility to use your computer as a head unit for your boat's sonar

A friend of mine (that I'll mention by username/name once he registers for github) is an avid fisherman, also a nerd. He noticed that the cabling to wire his boat's fancy sonar/depth-finder/fish-finder used what appeard to be standard cat-5. Curious and risk taking, he plugged his laptop in and fired up wireshark. Packets appeared!

He told me about it and I had to twist his arm to send me a copy of the pcap. I have some experience from my job in pulling apart mystery protocols and this seemed like a fun, off the clock project I could work on. I had been playing with pygame a few months prior to this and I had a demo whipped up in a day or two.

This all happened in the spring of 2011. I'm not a fisherman and I don't live anywhere near my friend who is, so development hasn't happend lately.

I'm not responsible for any laptops or fishing related equipment that might be damaged if you plug them into each other.

• Lowrance compatible with the HDS7 units

For this inital commit only the following are available:

• Reading from a pcap file
• Displaying the two side sonars and the straight down view

Features I plan on adding:

• Ability to read right off the wire
• Find other data I think is in the stream
• Speed, location (may come from gps unit and not in on the wire)
• Depth data
• Buttons (that emulate actual head-unit buttons)

Neale Pickett over at dirtbags.net wrote a dead-simple pcap reader that I use. He only has 1.0 from 2008 linked but I think I've been developing against with a snapshot from 2011.

Right now this is just the inital check-in, there are many, many things wrong.